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The Party of "No"

Technorati and Me

Technorati is indexing me again! They had to make a code change to fix
the problem with my blog getting stuck in their queue. Kudos to Eric M.
and the guys at
GetSatisfaction.com
where they have "community powered support for Technorati".

Well, they're "sorta, kinda" indexing me anyway. It's on a 24 hour tape
delay or something. So I never get picked up by Memeorandum because they
pull from Technorati and Technorati has stuff I posted yesterday
listed as my latest blog entry. And that's old news to Memeorandum.

Wankers.

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It's not enshrined in our state Constitution, so a future governor or
legislature can void it. And it's got enough holes in it to drive a
public employee union parade through with room to spare.

The two biggest drivers of our budget woes — public employee pension
contributions and their health insurance benefits — are exempted from
the cap. Thus the pressure to somehow find a way to fix the underfunded
state pension system will continue unabated.

But really, that ship has sailed. There isn't enough money in the universe
to fully fund those pensions. Eventually the unions are going to have to take
a haircut. But Christie has put off the day of reckoning by agreeing to keep
the pension costs outside the tax cap.

I want to see the unions try to force us to live under the cap and
fund those pensions. The cuts in services will be draconian. Garbage will
pile up in the streets so clerks can retire in luxury. Then a tax
revolt will seal the unions' fate.

Their gold-plated health benefits are also exempted. Where's the savings in
that? To incentivize the unions to save money we need to show that there isn't
an unlimited pot of gold at the end of Main Street. But here we are again,
if health care costs go up 20%, so do our taxes.

And then to really stick it to us taxpayers they exempted debt service too.
Wanna know what that means? Umlimited borrowing, that's what it means. When
borrowing costs aren't capped, suddenly everything gets paid for
with borrowed money.

Sweeney, who joined Christie at today's event, downplayed the political impact.

"The governor didn't score a victory. I didn't score a victory. Taxpayers
scored a victory," the Senate president said.

Hah. The public employee unions scored a decisive victory. Their
sacred cows went unscathed. Chris Christie blinked, and our chance to finally
corral the cost of government wriggled away.

Unfortunately, it's probably the best outcome we could hope for given that
spendthrift Democrats control the state legislature. If Assembly Speaker
Sheila Oliver had been given the time to "study" the plan and hold hearings
we'd have even more exemptions. This cap, warts and all, had to be passed,
and it had to be passed now.

But when we're having this same discussion a few years hence don't say I
didn't warn you.